StethoMe® | Knowledge base

Pack a lunch for your children and don’t fall into the trap of pseudo-healthy snacks

Written by StethoMe | Sep 1, 2016 2:49:00 PM

A school year begins and together with it there comes the matter of lunch that is either prepared at home or bought at school. I decided to review the ingredients of popular snacks that are advertised as excellent for satiating hunger, healthy, nutritious and perfect for our kids.

Let’s start with cookies that are marketed by its producer as a “breakfast”. Their packaging includes information on how to start a day in a healthy manner and how to make the most important meal (that is, breakfast) properly balanced. The list of ingredients is relatively long. What do we have here? In the order provided by the producer – let’s remember that this order corresponds to the percentage content of each ingredient in a finished product, starting with the highest one: grains, sugar, chocolate, rapeseed oil, cocoa powder, wheat starch, leavening agents (ammonium carbonate, diphosphates, sodium carbonates), emulsifiers (E492 – sorbitan tristearate, soy lecithin, E472e – mono- and diglycerides of fatty acids esterified using mono- and diacetyltartaric acid), minerals, salt, skimmed-milk powder, flavouring (what kind of?), vitamins. It’s worth noting that sugar is second in order on the list of ingredients which means that there’s a lot of it! We’ll handle emulsifiers later in a more collective fashion.